Re: How nautilus manage drive icons

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 18:59 +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 09.05.2006, 10:25 +0200 schrieb Xavier Claessens:
> > Le mardi 09 mai 2006 à 10:01 +0200, Christian Neumair a écrit :
> > > > For volume icons from the desktop, is it possible to make it work like
> > > > in computer:/// ? nautilus should generate on-the-fly same .drive files.
> > > > Like that we are sure that at least icons from desktop and from
> > > > computer:/// react the same way.
> > > 
> > > Passing around on-the-fly generated files (which would have to be put
> > > into file:///tmp) isn't a good idea IMHO, because it requires sniffing
> > > foreach passed-in URI. My proposal tried to address the fact that some
> > > applications are interested in volumes or drives but not in their
> > > corresponding files, since the actual volume/drive data can be queried
> > > from the volume monitor.
> > 
> > Ok. So computer:/// should works like x-nautilus-desktop:/// and
> > nautilus should never use the on-the-fly generated .drive files. Like
> > that most problems are solved because icons from desktop aren't accepted
> > for dropping anywhere.
> 
> No, it doesn't solve the problem, because - as you pointed out - not
> doing anything isn't really user-friendly either. IMHO it would be the
> best to operate on the drive's activation URI when dropping a volume or
> drive file to another folder.

The main problem is that the drive and volume identifiers are a) system
specific and b) not stable over time. So, its generally a problem to
save references to volumes/drives anywhere, whether that is on the
filesystem or in some panel config.

Thus, I think your comment is basically right. Outside of nautilus we
should probably just handle the activation uri for these things. Of
course, there are times we need to get the drive/volume object (for
instance in the hal property page extension for setting mount options),
so we need to be careful to not break this.

Of course, using activation uris makes some thing a much less useful
operation. For instance, dragging a volume to the desktop will try to
copy the entire volume there...

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
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